Why is my Amazon team not making money?

First of all, whether you are starting your own business or working for someone else, you cannot do without calculating profits when you are working for Amazon. Amazon’s fees are very complicated, plus your own shipping costs, orders, and other inputs, it is really a lot of work to calculate whether you are making a profit or a loss.

Especially for small business owners who have started their own business, if they simply calculate commissions for operators based on sales, although their workload will be reduced, it is easy to cause losses.

Moreover, there are more and more companies in the cross-border circle that use profits to calculate commissions. If operators do not have a good grasp of the profits of their products and blindly participate in activities, their commissions will be wasted.

Simply put, a correct way to calculate profit should be

Actual revenue from Amazon (excluding advertising and storage fees)

Subtract any expenses outside of Amazon (shipping, purchase price, etc.)

Everyone knows how to calculate the following types of expenses. Let me tell you how to view Amazon’s actual revenue situation.

First, generate a payment report on the payment page in the background. If there are few orders, it is recommended that you select "Transaction" so that you can see the specific amount of each expenditure/income. If there are too many orders and you cannot check them one by one, you should choose Summary.

The summary page is used to count the income and expenditure of each project. Each project (such as storage fees, sales revenue) only displays the final statistical value.

The "Transaction" option will generate detailed content. If you have questions about the fees or have fewer orders, it is recommended that you take a look at this table. For example, the sales tax that sellers rarely pay attention to will be displayed here, and you can see which orders are taxed in the table.

Sellers who have a lot of sales but feel that they are not making money can carefully study each of the above expenses to see where the money is spent. Then, by adding costs such as shipping and ordering to each order revenue, you can calculate the real profit margin of the product.

Calculating and grasping profits is a very critical link. Many sellers have finally overcome the difficulties in sales operations, but ended up making very little profit because they failed to control profits well. It is a pity.

Whether you are setting commissions for your operations staff or the operations themselves need to grasp the product profit margins, I recommend that you understand this transaction form thoroughly.

When starting an Amazon business, one cannot escape the need for team building. Regardless of whether the boss comes from product selection (purchasing) or operations, it is always difficult for one person to handle the numerous aspects of Amazon operations.

Unclear division of labor within the team, weak reward and punishment mechanism, and inability to retain old employees will all affect the profitability of the entire company.

However, I can’t give you any advice as I have never been a boss . Now let Teacher Alice tell us about the team.

From my experience of building Amazon teams from scratch twice, I believe that an excellent Amazon team with a virtuous cycle requires more control from the team leader.

I have been invited to many Amazon companies to work as a consultant or diagnose stores, so I have seen many "surface teams". What is a "surface team"? On the surface, there are operations, procurement, and other departments, but in fact, everyone is still doing their own work, and there is no chain of promotion between each other.

This situation will not cause any major problems in the short term, but it is very easy to encounter sales bottlenecks and it is difficult to break through.

To give you a more intuitive understanding of what an Amazon team with an excellent structure and division of labor needs, here is an example of a team of 30 people that I built from scratch.

This 30-person team is composed of the business department, finance department, purchasing department, quality inspection and shipping department, etc. If the company is small and has fewer employees, some adjustments and mergers can be made, but each department must have its own complete reward and punishment and performance system.

Establish an Amoeba management mechanism for outstanding team leaders, give them a certain degree of autonomy, and use phased performance to stimulate the sales performance of small teams.

With the above mechanisms, the team's cohesion and sales performance will be raised to a higher level, and they will be able to cope with even major changes with ease. The 30-person team I led switched from the clothing category to the home category due to business adjustments, and successfully returned to the level of monthly sales of 5 million within half a year. The power of an excellent team is evident.

Finally, let me summarize for everyone. Whether it is profit control or team building, they are both unavoidable links on the road to starting an Amazon business.

The above introduction to the profit algorithm is relatively comprehensive, but there are still many hidden contents in team building that cannot be discussed online. Teacher Alice will explain the Amazon team building skills to everyone in person at this offline salon. Scan the QR code to consult me ​​and sign up to participate~

PS. If you want to join the seller discussion group, you can also private message me to let me add you to the group

Click to like and share your experience▼